Fascism isn't really an ideology, it's really just an emotional manipulation. Get power through any means necessary. Use any lie or emotional manipulation you can to get people to help you gain power. You can go through Umberto Eco's 14 points but it all boils down to using emotions to get power.

In the social media age there's algorithms that will identify whatever emotion you want to feel and give you an endless stream of that.

You get a social media stream to make you fear and hate a particular group. But the algorithm is sophisticated enough to filter out the content that's manipulating others into hating and fearing your group. What small signs get through that filter can be passed off as just a joke, nothing serious. So you might feel you're part of the tribe that hates and fears LGBTQ, Black people, muslims, etc, without realizing that the group you feel a part of also hates and fears you.

Sure this happened in the past, but I feel it's much more common now than before. Like every second person I talk to (both online and in RL) is part of some some group dedicated to hating some other group. And everyone hates liberals.